Just got off the blower with a GS-14 Contracting Officer with TSI (read access). He could not tell me anything sensitive or classified of course but did say that he could not get their Web site to open and could find no record of this company having a "schedule contract". So if they have a contract it is open source or no-bid.

Its 3 miles from where the Anaheim Angels play, the Anaheim Ducks play, and 5 or 6 miles away from Disneyland. It also doesnt look very impressive of a building, I mean for a police force (unless its just some front)....

Anti_Illuminati

"They're really invisible," said Alan Chvotkin, executive vice president and counsel for the Professional Services Council. The group's members include major security contractors Triple Canopy, DynCorp and Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide.

How much would we want to bet that *Triple Canopy* is just another renamed, repackaged subsidiary of the reviled Blackwater Worldwide/Xe? That's the way these contractors continue to steal and wreak havoc, by a constant stream of name changes and layers of front company distortions. Hmmmm, resembles certain intel agency activities....

Somehow, there is an awful lot of weapons trafficking going on these days.

Last spring, the U.S. diplomatic mission in Iraq got a makeover, replacing the scandal-plagued Blackwater private security company with a firm named Triple Canopy.

The new $1 billion contract cemented Triple Canopy's status as the pre-eminent provider of private security services in Iraq, with its heavily armed employees appearing side by side with senior State Department diplomats.

But the company's rise to prominence followed a long, often chaotic route, marked by questionable weapons deals, government bungling and a criminal investigation that was ultimately closed without charges being filed, according to newly released investigative files.

Company employees told federal investigators that Triple Canopy swapped booze for weapons and supplies from the U.S. military. They said the company bought guns and other arms on the black market in Iraq. Some worried that the money was flowing into the hands of insurgents, records show.

The previously undisclosed documents and interviews with current and former Triple Canopy officials raise new questions about the U.S. government's ability to oversee private security contractors in a fluid and uncertain legal environment. And they give a glimpse into the messy business of creating a private army on the fly in the middle of a war zone.

"We're spending a lot of money on these rifles, millions of dollars -- where do you think that money is going to?” Ronald Boline, a former Triple Canopy manager, said in a lawsuit deposition videotaped in June 2007. “Who are we supporting in doing that? We're supporting people who are trying to kill Americans is the logical conclusion."

That lawsuit against the company, filed in a Virginia circuit court by other former employees who sued Triple Canopy for wrongful termination, was settled this week, records show, but no terms were disclosed.

The criminal investigation began in 2007 after federal investigators received a tip that Triple Canopy was using stolen cars and captured Iraqi weapons to boost profits to over 40 percent on some contracts. Andrew T. Baxter, the interim U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, declined to comment on why his office decided not to file charges. (His office handled the case because Triple Canopy’s invoices were paid out of a nearby federal contract processing center.)

Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, who oversaw the investigation, refused to talk about details. But he said the difficulty in building the case was indicative of the haphazard atmosphere in which billions of dollars of U.S. money was spent in Iraq without oversight.

"It's unclear if anything that Triple Canopy did was criminal, but it was symptomatic of the chaos that prevailed at the time," Bowen said. "It's another example of contracting gone wrong."

Triple Canopy officials said the firm had done nothing wrong. They acknowledged buying weapons in Iraq when they were unable to import U.S. guns. But Lee Van Arsdale, a retired Delta Force colonel who was the company’s CEO until recently, said in an interview before retiring that the firm had taken every precaution to ensure that no money wound up in insurgents’ hands.

"Not only are we former military, but our former colleagues are still serving in uniform, living, eating and breathing right beside us in some cases. In some cases, we've got family members out there," Van Arsdale said. "To say that we're going to fund the insurgency either directly or indirectly, that's insulting."

Triple Canopy began in September 2003, when two former Special Forces soldiers formed the company to take advantage of the burgeoning market for private security. Iraq was exploding in violence, and the U.S. lacked enough soldiers to protect U.S. and Iraqi officials, infrastructure and diplomatic outposts.

Within three months, the company got its first break: The U.S. awarded Triple Canopy a contract to protect more than a dozen sites across Iraq. At the time, the company had only a handful of employees. More serious, it didn't have licenses to import the hundreds of weapons needed to guard sites across Iraq.

The company immediately applied for licenses after winning the contract, according to documents provided by Triple Canopy. Yet the government took months to approve the deal, not authorizing the company to collect the weapons until June 2004. In essence, the U.S. had awarded the company a lucrative contract, but then provided it little ability to arm for the job.

To get the firepower it needed in the meantime, the company turned to the unregulated and unlicensed Iraqi market, purchasing AK-47s and other weapons from local dealers, according to company officials and court records.

The transactions concerned some company officials, according to previously undisclosed records. One midlevel manager told federal investigators that Triple Canopy had purchased weapons "off the street." He "wondered if the proceeds of those sales was funding the insurgency," an investigator wrote.

Former managers also told investigators that the company obtained U.S. military equipment from troops at little or no cost. One man told investigators in an October 2008 interview that the company sometimes obtained Army supplies “for liquor,” and that Triple Canopy employees routinely made “deals with Army units that were rotating in and out of Iraq, to obtain medical supplies, water, MRE’s and vehicle tires, to name a few.”

Boline, the former manager, said the company bought Cuban cigars and liquor to trade for U.S. military equipment. He spoke to investigators in 2007, according to records and officials, and his testimony became public later that year, when he provided a sworn statement as part of the employees’ lawsuit.

"The whole mind-set at the time was, whatever it takes to get the job done we're going to do it," said Boline, who had been fired from the company after disagreements with supervisors. He provided the deposition several months after his termination.

Van Arsdale acknowledged that importing U.S. weapons was "problematic" as the company began operations in Iraq. But he said the company took steps to make sure that it purchased weapons legally.

"There were a few months in there that, ‘all right, now what do we do?,’" Van Arsdale said. "The answer to that was that we establish … a procedure to procure weapons on the local market to mitigate the possibility of that fungible money getting into the wrong hands."

Van Arsdale said Triple Canopy turned to a trusted local buyer recommended by the U.S. government. Triple Canopy produced documents showing that the man it said purchased the weapons, an Iraqi businessman, had been vetted by Defense Department officials.

The company also produced several letters of recommendation from military officials praising the man, who also acted as a translator for U.S. military units.

Van Arsdale said the company had not swapped goods with soldiers for equipment. He said Triple Canopy fully investigated Boline's charges and found no evidence to support them.

He questioned Boline’s motives, noting that Boline waited until 2007 to make his accusations. In his deposition, Boline acknowledged threatening to go public with his charges if Triple Canopy officials blocked his attempts to receive a security clearance in order to obtain a new job.

Reached by e-mail, Boline declined to comment, citing a nondisclosure agreement that he signed when he took his job with Triple Canopy.

Van Arsdale acknowledged the hectic pace of fulfilling contracts. But he said that even under tight deadlines the company didn’t break the rules.

"We defined the gold standard for training and equipping people at great expense to ourselves as well as great time to ourselves,” he said. “At a period of hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, we took over two weeks to train guys to make sure they were prepared to go in country. To say that we're cutting corners and we're opportunistic and we're war profiteers, all of the facts argue against that.

"In terms of weapons procurement, the rules were clear and we followed them," Van Arsdale said.

But former senior officials with the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. occupation government that controlled Iraq until June 2004, questioned whether there were any established procedures for buying weapons from Iraqis.

They noted that any Iraqis with large quantities of weapons to sell were most likely businessmen or military officials associated with the former regime of Saddam Hussein.

Some former U.S. officials in Iraq said that buying guns locally was by definition illicit. Steve Casteel, the U.S. senior adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior at the time, said there was a "disconnect" between Washington and what was happening on the ground in Iraq.

"There was no legal market for the sale of weapons, so if they bought them it had to be black market," said Casteel, who now works for another private security company. "It wouldn't have been legal under U.S. guidance. It wouldn’t have been legal under any Iraq law that I'm aware of."

Triple Canopy's frustrations with the U.S. government were hardly unique. In numerous interviews, former U.S. and industry officials described a crazed atmosphere in which U.S. contracting officers demanded guns on the ground and asked few questions.

One private security company official said Iraqi vendors sold weapons at open-air markets, the tables stacked high with AK-47s and other armaments, in full view of U.S. officials.

"It was wide open. It was like a swap meet," said the official, who works for a Triple Canopy competitor and did not want to be identified. "I'm not aware of any company that didn't use it."

Companies that wanted to conduct business in normal channels were stymied by short deadlines, constantly changing requirements and bureaucratic clashes between U.S. officials on the ground in Iraq and in offices back in Washington.

"People needed to have weapons,” said one former official with the Coalition Provisional Authority. “So of course you went out and bought them on the black market because you couldn't get them from anywhere else. If you have a demand, you are going to have a supply."

CPA officials were aware that there were few controls over the weapons used by their private security contractors. But ideas to exert greater control were ignored.

"We recognized there was a problem, the CPA official said. “We had inconsistent quality. There was not as much control and accountability of those weapons as we wanted."

Other companies also found means. Blackwater, now known as Xe, said in a statement that it had obtained valid U.S. import and export licenses for its employees’ weapons. The company has been investigated for weapons smuggling, though no charges were filed and it denies the allegations.

An official with DynCorp, the second-largest security contractor in Iraq, said weapons were obtained from a variety of sources. In some contracts, requests for licenses were granted, allowing the import of U.S. weapons. For other contracts, requests were denied and the firm turned to the local weapons market.

"We were forced to turn to the local market even for U.S. government contracts and subcontracts because there weren't mechanisms in place to allow export of weapons in Iraq, yet we had the responsibility to provide services under those government contracts," said one DynCorp official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the topic.

A State Department official acknowledged that the department had been slow to respond to the need to arm the private companies it was hiring to carry guns. Until late 2004, the department's Directorate of Defense Trade Controls blocked most requests for the export of automatic weapons to private firms — the result of a decades-old policy to cut down on international arms trafficking.

When private security companies began requesting weapons to fulfill U.S.-issued contracts, the department was caught off guard, the official said. It wasn't until November 2004 that the policy was changed to grant private security companies export licenses — more than a year and a half after the first such firms were hired in Iraq.

"This was something that the State Department hadn't considered as a possibility" until the requests for licenses started coming in, said the official, who spoke on background per department policy. "What they did was go through a relatively long discussion and decision process to figure out how to deal with the problem."

While the system for importing weapons has improved in Iraq, industry and State Department officials acknowledged that problems remain in Afghanistan.

Partly, this reflects the fact that more groups are at work there. Unlike Iraq, there is a substantial presence of nonprofits and international aid organizations in need of security. Companies buying weapons from local sources continue to run the risk of money flowing to insurgents, one official said.

Afghanistan is similar in one way, however. Just as in the early days in Iraq, there are comparatively few investigators on the ground to watch the billions of dollars now flowing into the country.

It appears that the viral spreading of the controversy surrounding the American Police Force on YouTube as well as the blogosphere has caused the official website of the organization to be taken down either voluntarily or by the influx of traffic crashing their servers. We will see if they bring the site back up as it was or with new changes sugar coating their motives.

Logged

"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it." Martin Luther King, Jr.

Street view shows the building to be "Sariol Legal Center, LLP", but there are "For Lease, Office Retail" signs in the front. Guess they needed a place to set up a cheap office. Don't see any Helicopters

Logged

Anti_Illuminati

One of the largest private security companies in Iraq, Triple Canopy, was born immediately after the invasion. Plenty of other companies have done the same, some that were more established before the American invasion, some less.

by Daniel Bergner, The New York TimesAugust 14th, 2005

When Matt Mann needed to buy armored vehicles, he phoned his brother-in-law, Ken Rooke. Rooke didn't know the first thing about bullet-resistant windows or grenade-resistant floors, but he wasn't 100 percent unqualified to do the buying. At least he knew something about cars. At a speedway in North Carolina, he once called races for a local radio station. He was the closest Mann could come to an expert.

Mann, a retired U.S. Army Special Operations master sergeant in his late 40's, needed the vehicles quickly. And he needed guns. It was early last year, and the company he and two partners created, Triple Canopy, had just won government contracts to guard 13 Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters throughout Iraq. (The renewable six-month deals were worth, in all, about $90 million.) The C.P.A. was the governing body of the American-led military occupation. Triple Canopy -- not the American military -- would be protecting it. So would other companies. With the insurgency spiking, the job of keeping C.P.A. compounds from being overrun, and of keeping the architects of the occupation from being killed, had been privatized.

Yet when Triple Canopy was hired, it scarcely existed. Mann and one of his partners, Tom Katis, an old friend from Special Forces, talked after 9/11 about starting a business that might somehow address the threat of terrorism. They thought they might use their military backgrounds to train government agencies in anti-terrorism techniques. On a Special Forces exercise in Central America (both men were, at that point, in the National Guard, Mann having moved on from the regular Army to work as a civil engineer and Katis having graduated from Yale and begun a career in banking), they dreamed of their unborn enterprise under the jungle foliage -- the layered jungle canopy from which they took their name.

They didn't have much else. They were a name, a notion, when they heard about the C.P.A. security work and started bidding for the contracts. With money borrowed from family and friends, they began hiring former Army colleagues on the chance that the company might somehow succeed. They had little but résumés to give them hope. The résumés, though, were impressive. Mann spent six years with the Army's Delta Force, its most selective, most keenly trained and most secretive unit, and he recruited retired Delta operators. He is an irrepressible man with full, close-cropped gray hair, blue eyes and a radiant smile, and as he told me about Triple Canopy's early days, he recalled his disbelief at the men who were drawn to the company. ''He wants to work for me?'' he said he thought, over and over. But his modesty went only so far. ''Rock stars like to work with rock stars,'' he said. The ex-Delta soldiers, heavily decorated and with all kinds of combat and clandestine experience, kept signing on.

''We were the squirrel trying to get a nut,'' Al Buford, an early employee and Delta veteran, remembered about the company's initial prospects for work. And when they were hired to protect well over half of the C.P.A.'s sites in Iraq, and to escort C.P.A. officials along the country's lethal roads, ''we had a whole truckload of nuts dumped down on us.''

So the call went out to Mann's brother-in-law, Ken Rooke. ''I'm a gearhead,'' Rooke told me. ''But we were shooting from the hip on this thing. I never felt competent in what I was doing.''

''With the war going,'' he continued, there were no new armored vehicles to be had. He searched the Internet, made countless calls and bought a set of armored Mercedes sedans that once belonged to the sultan of Brunei before they were rented out to rappers. He replaced the stylish spoke wheels, and he put on run-flat tires, so the vehicles could be driven out of ambushes even after the tires had been blasted by gunfire. He learned how to ship his makeshift fleet to Iraq.

For guns, too, Triple Canopy had to make do. Transporting firearms from the United States required legal documents that the company couldn't wait for; instead, in Iraq, it got Department of Defense permission to visit the dumping grounds of captured enemy munitions. The company took mounds of AK-47's and culled all that were operable.

So Triple Canopy had vehicles and it had assault rifles, and when it needed cash in Iraq, to pay employees or buy equipment or build camps, it dispatched someone from Chicago, the company's home, with a rucksack filled with bricks of hundred-dollar bills. ''All the people in Iraq had to say is, 'We need a backpack,''' Mann said. ''Or, 'We need two backpacks.''' Each pack held half a million dollars.

And in this way, one of the largest private security companies in Iraq was born. In this way, Triple Canopy went off to war. Plenty of other companies have done the same, some that were more established before the American invasion, some less. The firms employ, in Iraq, a great number of armed men. No one knows the number exactly. In Baghdad in June, in a privately guarded coalition compound in the Green Zone, I talked with Lawrence Peter, a paid advocate for the industry and -- in what he called a ''private-public partnership'' -- a consultant to the Department of Defense on outsourced security. He put the number of armed men around 25,000. (This figure is in addition to some 50,000 to 70,000 unarmed civilians working for American interests in Iraq, the largest percentage by way of Halliburton and its subsidiaries, doing everything from servicing warplanes to driving food trucks to washing dishes.) But the estimates, from industry representatives and the tiny sector of academics who study the issues of privatized war, are so vague that they serve only to confirm the chaos of Iraq and the fact that -- despite an attempt at licensing the firms by the fledgling Iraqi Interior Ministry -- no one is really keeping track of all the businesses that provide squads of soldiers equipped with assault rifles and belt-fed light machine guns. Peter's best guess was that there are 60 companies in all. ''Maybe 80,'' he added quickly, mentioning that there were any number of miniature start-ups. He continued: ''Is it a hundred? Possibly.''

Triple Canopy now has about 1,000 men in Iraq, about 200 of them American and almost all the rest from Chile and Fiji. Its rivals include British firms that draw from the elite units of the U.K. military and outfits that draw from South African veterans of the wars to save apartheid. Australians and Ukrainians and Romanians and Iraqis are all making their livings in the business. Many have experience as soldiers; some have been in law enforcement. The firms guard the huge American corporations struggling to carry out Iraq's reconstruction. The private gunmen try to hold the insurgents at bay so that supplies can be delivered and power stations can be built. And companies like Triple Canopy shield American government compounds from attack. With guns poking out from sport utility vehicles, they usher American officials from meeting to meeting. They defend the buildings and people whom the insurgency would most like to reach.

Throughout his time as head of the C.P.A., L. Paul Bremer III, whom the insurgency may well have viewed as its highest-value target, was protected by a Triple Canopy competitor, Blackwater USA. Private gunmen, according to Lawrence Peter, are now guarding four U.S. generals. Triple Canopy protects a large military base. And throughout Iraq, the defense of essential military sites like depots of captured munitions has been informally shared by private soldiers and U.S. troops. If the 25,000 figure is accurate, the businesses add about 16 percent to the coalition's total forces.

Yet it is hard to discern who authorized this particular outsourcing as military policy. No open policy debate took place; no executive order was publicly issued. And who is in charge of overseeing these armed men? One thing is sure: they are crucial to the war effort. In April 2004, within a few months of Triple Canopy's arrival in Iraq, its men were waging a desperate firefight to defend a C.P.A. headquarters in the city of Kut. The Mahdi Army had launched an onslaught.

In the world of companies like Triple Canopy, a great deal of importance is attached to a very few words. The word ''mercenaries'' is despised. The phrase ''private military company'' is heatedly dismissed as inaccurate. ''Private security company'' (or P.S.C.) is the term of art.

Semantics aside, private soldiers have been on the battlefield for thousands of years. As P.W. Singer, a scholar of privatized warfare at the Brookings Institution, recounts in his book ''Corporate Warriors,'' mercenaries served in the army of the King of Ur two millennia before Christ; the ancient Greeks supplemented their forces by contracting out for cavalry and for specialists in the slingshot; and private bands of Swiss pikemen, infantry with 18-foot-long weapons, proved themselves superior to cavalry in the late 13th century and made themselves a necessary expense to the warring rulers of Europe for hundreds of years.

But mercenaries began to fade from the battlefield around the Age of Enlightenment. Partly this was because of breakthroughs in the science of warfare. Better weapons demanded less skill from the fighter. The experience of the mercenary was needed less. With a decently designed musket, a fresh soldier could be trained fairly swiftly and dispatched to the front. And then, too, the 18th and 19th centuries brought new ideas about the sanctity of the nation and the honor of the citizen in soldiering for it. ''Those who fought for profit, rather than patriotism,'' Singer writes, ''were completely delegitimated.'' Still, the British hired 30,000 German Hessians to help them battle the revolutionaries in the American War of Independence. Yet gradually the work of the mercenary grew more and more marginalized and disdained, and in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 it was essentially outlawed, at least in wars between nations.

Mercenaries carried on in the ignored and anarchic places of the world; through much of the second half of the 20th century, they played notorious roles in the insurrections of Africa. But then, in 1995, in the tiny West African country of Sierra Leone, private soldiering made a morality-twisting appearance. A rebel army was burning villagers alive and starting to develop its signature atrocity: hacking off the hands of civilians and letting them live as reminders of rebel power. Desperate, the country's ruler hired a South African firm, Executive Outcomes, that was run by a former apartheid-era military commander. It presented itself as something other than a violent, shadowy employment agency for apartheid-era veterans. It had glossy brochures outlining its military services. Its leader called himself a chairman. Its work wasn't that of ''mercenaries'' or ''dogs of war''; it would soon adopt the term ''private military company.''

In Sierra Leone, using a few aircraft and about 200 men, Executive Outcomes rapidly drove the rebel army of perhaps 10,000 back to the country's hinterlands. Brutality erupted again as soon as Executive Outcomes left, but the world had seen that a small, well-trained private force could accomplish immeasurable good.

Not long afterward, a London company led by a former British lieutenant colonel, Tim Spicer -- whose latest firm now has a nearly $300 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense in Iraq -- tried again to rescue the West African country. Spicer failed but emerged as a kind of spokesman for the moral value of private military companies. ''The word 'mercenary,' '' he told The Daily Telegraph of London in 1999, ''conjures up a picture in people's minds of a rather ruthless, unaligned individual, who may have criminal, psychotic tendencies. We are not like that at all. All we really do is help friendly, reasonable governments solve military problems.'' (No matter that Spicer had once considered providing his help to Mobutu Sese Seko, the tyrannical dictator of Zaire, for a price.) Britain's foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and a former United Nations under secretary general, Brian Urquhart, were soon talking about the possible use of private military companies to aid the U.N. in stabilizing the world's conflict zones. The U.N. wasn't remotely ready to hire private armies to end civil wars, but a subtle shift in perception had started to take place.

In 2002, the U.S. government hired about 40 private gunmen, from the American company DynCorp, to keep President Hamid Karzai alive in Afghanistan. And in the spring of 2003, as Gen. Jay Garner, retired, established the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the short-lived precursor to the C.P.A., as the occupation's governing body in Iraq, the Pentagon put a small contingent of South Africans and Nepalese Gurkhas from the British firm Global Risk Strategies in charge of protecting him and his staff. ''That,'' Garner told me when we spoke last month, ''was the genesis'' of the rise of private security companies in Iraq.

The numbers, at the start of the occupation, were not large. Then, in the second half of 2003, as the C.P.A. expanded its presence across the country in its attempt to rule and rebuild, and as the insurgency mounted, the C.P.A. turned away from the coalition forces, which had been providing a measure of protection, and looked to the companies for safety. Andrew Bearpark, the C.P.A.'s director of operations during that period, explained to me that he was closely and strongly advised by the U.S. military in Iraq -- and financed by the Department of Defense -- to make this move.

Major contracts were put out for bidding. Triple Canopy was awarded its work in January 2004. Other companies received, or already had, their portions. (Meanwhile, the corporations actually doing the rebuilding, the hearts-and-minds element of the American occupation's campaign, were spending up to 25 percent of their U.S. government money on hired protection.) The deployment of private gunmen grew and grew into a profusion that may be explained partly by the subtle shift in perception that had removed some of the old mercenary stigma, and partly by the emphasis on outsourcing that had been gathering momentum in the U.S. military since the early 1990's (but that had been focused on logistical, unarmed support). Most immediately, though, the explosive growth may be explained by the strength of the insurgency in Iraq and by the apparent fact that there weren't enough troops on the ground to fight it.

''Sure, they are performing a military role,'' Garner said of the companies. Then, while noting that he wasn't criticizing the Department of Defense, he added, ''The gut problem is the force'' -- that is, the U.S. fighting force -''is too small.'' And Bearpark, who has lately become a consultant to a large security firm, maintained that private protection might sometimes be better than what a regular army could offer. The private teams are more streamlined and flexible, he argued; they are often better trained for the job; and they may be willing to take more risks, allowing officials to move more freely. But about the fundamental reason for the C.P.A.'s hiring of the companies, he said: ''The military just hadn't provided enough numbers. It was stretched to the limit.''

The Department of Defense is reluctant to discuss the role of security companies in Iraq and precisely how it got so big. Over several weeks I called the Pentagon repeatedly, asking whether the secretary of defense or one of his under secretaries had, at any point, deliberated about the presence of some 25,000 armed men or perhaps authorized it in one way or another, piecemeal or in its entirety. These questions -- which no one I spoke to was able to answer -- elicited from departmental press officers a series of unfulfilled promises to help me get an answer. In the end, they sent an officially approved written statement, which detoured fully around the questions but included the key line, ''P.S.C.'s are not being used to perform inherently military functions.''

The Pentagon's reticence on the issue may be due to uneasiness over the now-common accusation that it didn't adequately plan for battling an insurgency. (It may view questions about private gunmen as leading inevitably to questions about troop numbers.) But there is most likely an additional discomfort, a lingering problem with the companies' public image. For the shift in perception hasn't been complete; the hated word ''mercenaries'' still hovers near. With this problem, the firms are doing their best to help. Many of them have tried to rechristen themselves again, to further separate themselves from the past, from the old infamy of ruthless, insurrection-stirring white freelancers in Africa, to make their work palatable to all.

When I met with Lawrence Peter, a short man with a fiery voice, he raged that the press refused to accept the companies' newly chosen term: ''We are not private military companies! We are private security companies! Private security!'' He justified the distinction by saying: ''The work is defensive. We protect.'' Sometimes, though, the distinction seems secondary. No matter what you want to call Triple Canopy and its men, when the Mahdi Army -- a radical Shiite force loyal to the militant cleric Moktada al-Sadr -- attacked at Kut, the primary truth was that the company was fighting a war.

A current training adviser for Triple Canopy was, in early April 2004, in charge of defending the occupation's Kut headquarters. (For security reasons, it is Triple Canopy policy that employees now in Iraq or likely to return not be identified by their full names.) John, a tall spike of a man of 50, with a graying brush mustache, spent 26 years in the U.S. Army, much of that time with Delta. He was on the first invading helicopter into Grenada in 1983; his helicopter and the others behind him were riddled and ravaged by bullets, and three soldiers sitting near him were shot. ''I've never taken so much fire again till Kut,'' he told me in May. ''Kut was like stepping out into the air -- you know you might not exist any longer.''

Facing a river and enwrapped on three sides by the small, mostly Shiite city, the C.P.A. compound in Kut consisted of several one- and two-story concrete structures. The buildings had been Baathist offices and a hotel. There the coalition's regional ruler, known as the governorate coordinator, worked and lived with a crew of reconstruction officials and contractors, surrounded by 12-foot-high blast walls at the compound's perimeter -- except along the river, where, John told me, the governorate coordinator, a Brit, preferred that nothing obstruct the view. The city had been fairly peaceful. It was a ''sleepy hollow,'' John recalled his Triple Canopy boss telling him, joking that it was a suitable post for an old, graying man to guard.

The first sign of siege was the massing of more than a thousand demonstrators in a few clusters around the city and around the compound, demanding that the C.P.A. leave Kut. Many in the crowds carried assault rifles and grenade launchers. John sensed, he said, that the protest at the compound might be a ruse, a cover for casing the site. Word came that the coalition-trained Iraqi police had abandoned their stations and checkpoints throughout the town, that the Mahdi fighters had claimed their weapons and uniforms. John had a core team of three Triple Canopy gunmen. There were about 40 Ukrainian coalition troops posted at the compound. The Iraqi guards employed by Triple Canopy were already starting to quit and to flee.

John declared ''lockdown'' and waited for whatever would come. Civilians strapped on their flak jackets and bulletproof vests. They prepared to retreat to a central spot within the hotel, a last point of defense, if the compound's perimeter was overrun. Warnings filtered in of car bombs set to strike. Through the night, two cars seemed to be casing the gates. Morning brought the sound of gunshots around the town -- and the ominous realization that the area just outside the compound was now desolate. Gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades started to hit around noon. The assault came from nearby, as close as the buildings across the street. It came from all sides. Mortars crashed in. A grenade exploded into a C.P.A. Suburban; the vehicle was consumed in flames. ''1740: Mortar fire has increased from across the river,'' reads a minute-by-minute account kept by a civilian contractor. Windows shattered; large fragments cracked from building walls; vehicles were ripped apart.

The enemy barrage of artillery and small arms surged and slackened and surged again. ''Throughout the battle, the commander of compound perimeter defense by de facto is John,'' states another contractor's hour-by-hour report. John climbed to the hotel roof to direct return fire. The three Triple Canopy gunmen manned the towers. Successive shifts of Iraqi guards had by now flooded out the gates after one was slightly wounded and a translator spread the rumor that the Americans planned to abandon them all to their deaths. Just two local soldiers remained; John put them on a machine gun. For hours the Ukrainians battled relentlessly; when they ran low on ammunition, John resupplied them with Triple Canopy rounds, the minute-by-minute account relates. He sent a fourth Triple Canopy soldier, a young dog handler who'd never seen a moment of combat, to race from tower to tower, taking bullets and water to the other T.C. fighters, who, John said, ''slung lead like you wouldn't believe,'' 2,500 rounds, he guessed. Triple Canopy's bomb-sniffing dog was left tied in the hotel and howled every time a mortar exploded.

On the roof and rushing through the compound between blasts, John juggled three radios and a satellite phone between his hands and combat vest pockets. None of the contingents he needed to speak with -- Triple Canopy; the separate company that handled the governorate coordinator's personal security (and that had pulled back to protect him within the compound); the civilian contractors; the U.S. military liaison in another town -- used the same communication system. He implored the military to send attack aircraft to scatter al-Sadr's men, who probably numbered 200 to 400.

The battle flared through the night. Heavy machine guns opened up from across the river. ''2200: There is an air-lift evacuation plan being put together.'' Two hours later: ''We were advised by T.C. that the air evacuation was scrubbed'' -- the odds of a helicopter being shot down while landing or lifting off were too high. An American plane at last arrived, its canons spewing shells. The militia went quiet, but then: ''0100: The hotel is hit several times and the building shakes from the impact. This fire seems to be the worst yet of the engagement.''

There appeared to be no escape; John figured the defense might be finished; on his radios and satellite phone he tried to keep his voice controlled, to keep his words, as he recounted, ''on the level of an information exchange.'' U.S. helicopter gunships then flew overhead. They held fire, but the enemy took cover again. And near dawn, in the lull, John and the Ukrainians carried out an order from the main C.P.A. headquarters in Baghdad that everyone should drive out of the compound, no matter what the risk in exposing themselves. They went in a mix of armored cars and open-sided trucks. ''Every turn you made, you didn't know,'' John said. He waited for mortars and R.P.G.'s to annihilate them. But the gunships tracked their route. No enemy fire came; they reached the closest coalition base; the civilians and soldiers of the compound had survived the battle without a serious wound.

The same week, a hundred miles to the west in the town of Najaf, eight private soldiers from the Blackwater company fought al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, stopping them from overrunning the C.P.A. headquarters there. The Blackwater men went unscathed. But just across town from John during the Kut fighting, the Mahdi Army attacked a building that housed five gunmen from the Hart Group, a British firm protecting the reconstruction of Iraq's electrical grid. The five were wounded, and one, pinned down on the building's roof in a firefight, bled to death.

A week earlier, four Blackwater soldiers, escorting a kitchen-supply truck to a U.S. military base, were ambushed and shot by insurgents in Fallujah -- their bodies roped to the back of a car and dragged through the streets, set on fire, torn apart and put on display, dangling from a Fallujah bridge. At the time, the Fallujah killings seemed notable not only for their brutality but also for the fact that private security men had been the victims.

Yet private security men in Iraq are embattled constantly. Between January and August 2004 (the last period for which the company has compiled figures), Triple Canopy teams came under attack 40 times, in incidents ranging from incoming rounds of rocket-propelled grenades to assaults lasting at least 24 hours. And the count of 40, I was told by the company's director of operations, represented only attacks in which Triple Canopy fired back. Six to eight times that number of assaults -- from sprays of enemy bullets to mortar fire -- had gone unrecorded, a company spokesman estimated. The frequency of attacks remains about the same now. The style has shifted away from assaults like the one at Kut, but guerrilla ambushes are on the rise.

It is impossible to say exactly how many private security men have been killed in Iraq. Deaths go unreported. But the figure, according to Lawrence Peter, is probably between 160 and 200. That's more deaths than any one of America's coalition partners have suffered.

"Some people will tell you they're here for Mom and apple pie,'' a private security man with another company told me. (He didn't want his or his company's name printed, he said, because neither his colleagues nor the industry in general think kindly of conversations with the media.) ''That's bull. It's the money.''

We sat between low concrete buildings at Triple Canopy's Baghdad base. The roofs are four feet thick and specially layered to absorb major blasts. The base sits within the Green Zone, behind high walls that divide the coalition's vast self-delineated borough from the severe danger of the rest of Baghdad. But the zone, as the people living and working there like to say, is these days less green than almost red: mortars rain in.

The man's company put him up at Triple Canopy's freshly built complex, with its pristine dining hall and ramshackle gym, its guard towers and long shipping container full of ammunition. The base is large enough that other outfits can rent rooms. Triple Canopy has come a long way from its haphazard beginnings. Its current contracts in Iraq, mostly with the U.S. Department of Defense and the State Department, are worth almost $250 million yearly. And having succeeded in Iraq -- Triple Canopy hasn't had a single worker or client killed -- it has just been named one of three companies that will divide up $1 billion annually in newly created protection work with the State Department in high-risk countries around the world.

But the private security man I sat with wasn't talking about windfalls on that level. He was talking about his own income. ''I'm richer than I've ever been,'' he said. ''I'm not in debt to nobody.''

He had jowls and loose swells of flesh beneath his T-shirt. ''Don't let the package fool you,'' the ex-Delta colonel who introduced us had told me. ''He's a commando from way back.'' After a career in Special Forces, the man said, he hadn't seemed able to survive in the civilian world. Work in construction fell apart. He drank heavily. He took a job as a cashier in a convenience store -- ''till I found out I had to smile at the customers.'' He laughed ruefully at his inability to adapt. But now, when his 16-year-old son sent him an e-mail message from back home in South Carolina, with a picture to prove that he'd mowed the lawn the way his mother had asked, he could buy the boy some tech equipment as a gift. ''I'll stay until this is over,'' he said. ''The money's too good.''

He didn't specify his salary, but Americans and other Westerners in the business tend to make between $400 and $700 a day, sometimes a good deal more. (The non-Westerners earn far less. Triple Canopy's Fijians and Chileans make between $40 and $150 dollars each week and sleep in crowded barracks at the Baghdad base, while the Americans sleep in their own dorm rooms. The company explained the difference in salaries in terms of the Americans' far superior military backgrounds and their higher-risk assignments.) Americans with Triple Canopy stay in Iraq for three-month rotations, working straight through. Then they're sent on leave for a month, returning if they wish. Depending on how much time they spend in the States over the course of a year, most of their income can be tax-free.

Yet it wasn't all about the pay, not for everyone. ''The money, sure,'' Al, a Triple Canopy manager in Baghdad, said. Like plenty of others with the company, he was middle-aged and had retired from the rarefied world of Delta. ''But it's the excitement, the camaraderie.''

And back in the Chicago suburb where I visited the company in May, in its new, sprawling offices (which Triple Canopy would soon be exchanging for a similar setup outside Washington, in order to be closer to its main source of income, the U.S. government), I heard Matt Mann talk exuberantly about ''creating a national asset.'' It would have been easy to be exuberant merely because of the profits he was taking in; it would have been easy to be downright giddy.

But his enthusiasm seemed to come, as well, from other things. He spoke about the waste of Special Operations stars, ''men whose intelligence is equal to the best attorneys, the best doctors,'' men who had survived the harshest training, who had learned to operate on their own in alien cultures, who ''don't know how to fail.'' Their talents, he said, were going unrecognized and unused when they left the military and entered civilian society. A long window beside him looked out on a perfectly manicured office park, its pond rippling delicately. Wearing jeans and a short-sleeved sport shirt with a summery print, he leaned back behind his blond wood desk, hands behind his head, strong, tanned arms on display. In a sense, he might have been any renegade businessman who had conjured a new product and found himself in a spot of corporate comfort. But a map of Iraq, its yellow tones in quiet contrast to the blond of the wood, was posted on the wall. He didn't care to talk about his personal thoughts on the war but saw himself as creating a collection of talent that was driven less by the '' 'me' mind frame,'' he said, than by patriotism.

In an office near Mann's sat Al Buford, the company's manager of recruiting, wearing sharply pressed khakis and a pale blue dress shirt. On a bookshelf behind him, a framed photograph showed him in jungle camouflage, on an Army Special Operations mission in Panama. Facing him on his desk, his computer was loaded with scores from the psychometric exam Triple Canopy gives its potential employees. The company's three-week training and selection course includes multiple-choice word analogy and number pattern questions between the high-speed driving drills and target tests at the firing range. And there are hundreds of questions designed to catch personality problems before the company gives a candidate a gun and sends him off to Iraq.

Other firms take a different approach. One morning, at a military base near the Baghdad airport, a Triple Canopy soldier I was with ran into a friend who had just been fired by the company. The friend had been drunk repeatedly; he'd been caught drinking right up to the hour he was slated for armed escort of a client. The previous day, the friend told us, he went to talk with another American company. Today he was signing a contract.

There is no effective regulation in Iraq of whom the firms hire or how the men are trained or how they conduct themselves. ''At best you've got professionals doing their best in a chaotic and aggressive environment,'' Lyle Hendrick said in an e-mail from Iraq in July, describing his colleagues in private security there. He had spent six months with one company in the country's north and is now with another down in Basra. ''At worst you've got cowboys running almost unchecked, shooting at will and just plain O.T.F. (Out There Flappin').''

I had come to know Hendrick, a tall, soft-spoken, part Blackfoot Native American from South Carolina, while he was on leave in the States. He had been a Special Forces captain, then a private detective; he eventually ran out of money as he let work slip to care for his stepfather, who had had a severe stroke. When he signed on with his first company and, in June of last year, flew into Mosul, a hotbed of the insurgency, a convoy of pickup trucks arrived at the airport to meet the new hires. To his uninitiated eyes, the men in the vehicles ''looked like extras in Mel Gibson's Road Warriors,'' he said. They told him to climb in and to stay ready to shoot while they drove, to watch his sector. ''There was no instruction, no sit-down, no here's how we operate; it was, throw your stuff on the truck and let's go.''

A few months later, he was riding in a convoy, in the back seat of a pickup's cab, escorting an Army Corps of Engineers team to a spot out in the desert, where they would blow up captured munitions. Across the desolate terrain, according to Hendrick and a colleague who was present that day, a white S.U.V. appeared from behind a berm. It was on Hendrick's side, 200 yards away. Hendrick wore a black helmet, tinted goggles and a black shirt, with a kaffiyeh wrapped around his neck and taupe-colored shooting gloves. He leaned out his window clutching a belt-fed light machine gun. The distance kept closing. ''He's coming in! He's coming at us!'' he heard someone on his team call out. He thought, Idiot farmer. He had the best angle; he fired warning shots. He could see the driver dressed all in white. The distance shrank to less than 30 yards. He aimed into the wheels. ''Idiot farmer turned to No, this isn't happening in a fraction of a second,'' he said. All was instinct. He riddled the driver's door and shot into the driver's window. The S.U.V. jerked to the side -- it exploded, ''went from white to a ball of bright orange,'' so close that the blast demolished a vehicle in the convoy, though the men inside weren't hurt. The S.U.V. all but vaporized. It had been packed with explosives -- a suicide bomber. The largest trace left was a scrap of tire. A bit of the bomber's scalp clung to one of the vehicles in the convoy.

Hendrick showed me photographs of the smoky aftermath. He wanted to be sure I understood the kind of circumstances he and his colleagues were dealing with. But he also said, ''This whole thing has brought out some pretty scary characters.'' He mentioned a newspaper article about one of the men he'd worked alongside. The man was arrested when he went on leave back to the States. Apparently the security company hadn't done much of a background check, if it had done one at all; it turned out the man was a fugitive in Massachusetts. He had been charged with embezzlement. He had also violated the terms of a suspended sentence in a separate case, a local paper in Lowell, Mass., explained: he'd been convicted of assault ''for nearly blowing a friend's jaw off during a game of Russian Roulette.''

Mark raised his strong forearms and performed a pantomime of washing his hands and flicking off the water. A manager with Triple Canopy in Baghdad, Mark was sitting behind his desk at T.C.'s base, demonstrating the Department of Defense's attitude about overseeing and policing the private security companies. ''D.O.D. doesn't want anything to do with it,'' he said. ''They don't have time. They don't have the numbers. And State can't investigate incidents. They don't have the investigators. So there's Iraqi law. Not that Iraqi law really exists. Am I going to give up my weapons to Iraqi police? I don't think so. That could get me killed.''

No one knows how many times gunfire from a private security team has wounded a bystander or killed an innocent driver who ventured too close to a convoy, not realizing that mere proximity would be taken for a threat. When they fire their weapons in defense or warning, the teams rarely concern themselves with checking for casualties -- it would be too dangerous; they are in the middle of a war. Besides, no one in power is watching too closely.

And what rules exist seem to be ignored. A C.P.A. decree, which has now evolved into Iraqi law, limits the caliber and type of weapons that private security personnel employ. But I was told by several people in the business that, especially outside Baghdad, weapons like heavy machine guns and grenades are -- perhaps by necessity -- sometimes part of the arsenal.

A few of the major American and British firms, Triple Canopy among them, advocate careful supervision of their business by their governments and possibly, in the future, by the United Nations. They'd like checks on everything from adequate training to human rights violations. They'd like to see their more rash competitors lose their contracts. They'd like to legitimize the work, to remove the remaining stigma that their own men are rogues, mercenaries.

Back in October of last year, a Congressional bill demanded that the Department of Defense come up with a plan to manage the security companies -- to investigate individual backgrounds and inculcate rules of engagement and enforce compliance. Until then, according to a Pentagon official with knowledge of the process who asked not to be named because the Pentagon plan is still being finalized, the department had been at work, for many months, on doctrine dealing in a general way with all types of private contractors in Iraq but not specifically addressing the huge sector of gunmen. It seems that only the October bill drove the Pentagon to formally account for the most vital, and potentially most troubling, part of its outsourcing. Congress gave the department six months to produce its plan. Nine months have passed. The Pentagon has now promised the document any day; there's no telling whether it will change anything -- what guidelines it will give, what level of commitment will be behind them. When I asked the Pentagon official about who would enforce the rules in Iraq, I was told that the country's new sovereignty would be ''the context.'' It was hard not to think that the infant government of Iraq would be left mostly on its own to control the thousands of private gunmen that the American-led occupation has introduced to the country. It was hard not to think that the companies would be left to govern themselves.

Fourteen armed security men, traveling in a convoy through Fallujah in May, were detained by U.S. Marines, the first and only time, it appears, that the military has made such a detention. A Marine memo, quoted in The Washington Post, accused the men, who worked for a company called Zapata Engineering, of ''repeatedly firing weapons at civilians and marines, erratic driving and possession of illegal weapons'' -- six anti-tank weapons, the Zapata men later explained, kept for defense and condoned, they claimed, by the U.S. military. The security men (eight of them former marines) said they had fired only typical warning shots at civilians. They insisted that their bullets had never struck close to any servicemen. They suggested that their detention -- which lasted three days before they were released, without charges so far -- was driven by jealousy over their pay. They told of being roughed up and taunted, of being asked, ''How does it feel to be a rich contractor now?''

This kind of resentment may be deepening. What Matt Mann called a ''national asset'' may be corrosive. And the private security companies are, almost surely, eroding elite sectors of the military; the best-qualified troops, the men most desirable to the companies, are lured by private salaries that can be well more than twice their own. The Special Forces have lately responded with re-enlistment bonuses of up to $150,000. It's not enough. One Triple Canopy man in his mid-30's, with about 15 years of Special Operations experience, told me that his commander had begged him to stay in the service. ''But there was no way,'' he said. ''Here I get to be with the best and make so much more money.'' Triple Canopy, Mann had said to me, has a policy of never recruiting directly from the military. But when this man quit the Army, he knew exactly where he wanted to go. And plenty of his old friends from ''the unit'' -- a Delta soldier's oblique way of referring to his exclusive caste -- were poised to follow.

There may be a danger that something else could erode eventually, if there is a drift toward using more private gunmen -- in yet more military ways -- to compensate for the inevitable reduction of troops in Iraq or to wage other wars. There may be the loss of a particular understanding, a sense of ourselves as a society, that we hold almost sacred. Soldiering for profit was taken for granted for thousands of years, but the United States has thrived in an age when soldiering for the state -- serving your country -- has taken on an exalted status. We often question the reasons for making war, but we tend to revere the soldiers who are sent off to fight. We honor their sacrifice, we raise it up and in it we see the value of our society reflected back to us. In it we feel our special worth. We may not know what to think of ourselves if service and sacrifice are increasingly mixed with the wish for profit. We may know less and less how to feel about a state that is no longer defended by men and women we can perceive as pure.

But that is an abstract and perhaps a distant worry. To wonder what will happen when the private work in Iraq finally winds down is a more concrete concern. What will happen to these companies, these men, without these thousands of jobs? Some will get contracts protecting U.S. departments and agencies around the world. Some will do the same for other governments. Doug Brooks, whose Washington industry organization, the International Peace Operations Association, represents several of the largest firms, says he believes the United Nations will soon hire the companies to guard refugee camps in war zones. But some of the firms and some of the men will no doubt be offered work by dictators or terrible insurgencies -- or by the kind of oil speculators who reportedly backed a recent mercenary-led coup plot in Equatorial Guinea (a plot involving former members of Executive Outcomes), in an attempt to install a ruler to facilitate their enterprise. And with so many newly created private soldiers unemployed when the market of Iraq finally crashes, aren't some of them likely to accept such jobs -- the work of mercenaries in the chaotic territories of the earth?

At their Baghdad base, eight Triple Canopy gunmen and I got into an S.U.V. and a sedan, the armored doors heavy enough that opening them felt like pulling them against water. The men, in T-shirts and bulletproof vests stuffed with ammunition clips, were ready to make the morning's run. I was the person they would be escorting. They figured that would be a decent way to give me a sense of how they work. I had to get to the airport, anyway.

At a pre-run meeting, their team leader told them that the loud blasts we all heard a few hours earlier had been a series of V.B.I.E.D.'s -- vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices -- in a neighborhood adjacent to the Green Zone. He told them that optimal speed for the run would be 100 miles per hour. They didn't need to be told that the five-mile strip of highway between the Green Zone and the airport is known as the most dangerous road in the world. The insurgents plant remote-controlled bombs on the shoulders or sit on the access roads in cars packed with explosives, and they wait. They look for sets of vehicles that appear to belong to security teams -- teams that are their enemy and that shield enemy officials.

The armor on the S.U.V. and the sedan wasn't going to do enough against bombs; it might not do enough against rocket-propelled grenades. Each vehicle held a rucksack full of ammunition in case an attack crippled the cars and left the men in a long firefight. A medic goes on every run. Sitting on my left in the back seat of the S.U.V., twisted to the side to peer through his window with rifle in hand, the medic pointed out to me an extra transfusion kit. ''You'll need to try and use that if I'm bleeding to death,'' he said.

We didn't get far from the Green Zone gate. Traffic was thick on the highway, and slow speeds allow the insurgents to better strike their targets, timing the detonations of their roadside bombs or driving close with their suicide cars. A white fuel truck appeared alongside us, its tank ready to erupt with the launching of a grenade. We veered onto the dirt median and fled back to base. ''We're a boring company,'' Al, one of the managers, had told me. ''We mitigate risk.''

An hour later the team leader decided to give it one more try. We sped away from the Green Zone, accelerating hard onto the highway. ''White van tracking us!'' a gunman called. On the access road, the suspicious van kept pace.

Then, suddenly, we were braking. Traffic crawled and doors were ''cracked.'' That is the company term: doors are opened as little as possible, and rifles are pointed out -- the response when other vehicles get too near. The windows on armored vehicles are so heavy that they don't reliably roll up once they're rolled down, so Triple Canopy's men don't use the windows to point their guns. The door-cracking is rehearsed procedure; they can ride this way at top speed, leaning out to aim their guns in warning, or to put bullets into the engine of an oncoming car. They did it now at almost no speed at all.

Traffic was barely creeping. ''Watch this guy on the right!''

To the right and behind, the threat edged closer. I couldn't help thinking of Lyle Hendrick, of the suicide bomber he'd shot at the last instant. But now, instead of firing, the gunman to my right lifted a hand off his barrel and raised bunched fingers in the air, an Iraqi signal, telling the driver to stop, to back off. Whether by luck or instinct, it was a good call. The driver quit inching forward, his attention caught by the fingers or the muzzle.

We steered onto the shoulder, passing a dozen cars to reach the head of the stalled traffic. ''Big Army'' was there -- the companies' name for the regular forces. The troops waved us down. They told us they'd found a bomb on the road a few hundred yards ahead, and we waited for their explosives crew to set it off. A concussive wave surged through our chests; smoke billowed over the pavement.

Then the way to the airport was clear. The military gate grew visible. Just outside it, another company's convoy was ambushed earlier in the week. But already, around me in the S.U.V., the men relaxed slightly as we approached the checkpoint. And once we were through it, muscles -- around eyes, across backs -- slackened perceptibly. For the moment, risk seemed all behind us.

Daniel Bergner, a contributing writer, is the author of ''In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa.''

Its 3 miles from where the Anaheim Angels play, the Anaheim Ducks play, and 5 or 6 miles away from Disneyland. It also doesnt look very impressive of a building, I mean for a police force (unless its just some front)....

What in Hades is going on in Montana? In April 2009, Two Rivers Authority and the Hardin City Council started looking into housing enemy combatants currently detained in Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo), Cuba. A few weeks later (May 15th), a business called the American Police Force (”APF”) registers the domain name AmericanPoliceGroup.com. The next thing you know, APF is trying to contract to operate a private jail and police training center for $27 million.

It seems that the detention facility was built but had no prisoners. APF offered to fill the jail and operate it.

Although no agreement has been reached because, among other issues, bondholders have rejected it, APF employees have apparently patrolled the streets of Hardin City in Mercedes SUVs with “Hardin City Police” decals on the sides of the vehicles…but there isn’t a city police department. Crime is handled by the county sheriff’s department.

Think about this for a minute. A private company with no government contract suddenly decides to play police in your home town. What would you do?

It gets better. The server for APF’s website happens to host Defense Product Solutions’ website. This company registered its domain name way back on June 19, 2009. Note that both APF and DPS use the double-headed eagle for their corporate logos. AlliedDefenseSystems.com (registered March 2007) appears to be a related site. This website’s administrative contact is Mohammad Abdalla. Mr. Abdalla is listed as the COO for this company in Anaheim, CA.

Here’s where it gets more strange. The admin e-mail is for a Mr. Edward Angelino, who just happens to be listed as a small business contact for Defense Logistics Services, Inc., a company that appears to be providing foreign military sales support for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Mr. Angelino has an interesting tracking record when it comes to both lawsuits and government contracts.

DESCRIPTION: Foreign Military Sales (FMS) Support to Kingdom of Saudia Arabia Logistical, Financial Management, Analysis, and Administrative Support

According to the California Secretary of State’s office, Defense Logistics Services, Inc. was formed in 2004 but is dissolved.

There is, however, an American Private Police Force Org Inc. that was incorporated March 2, 2009, and is based in Anaheim too. In addition to being the corporation’s agent for service of process, a Mr. Michael Hilton is the self-designated “Captain” of the APF.

The APF claims it is the subsidiary of a parent company but won’t identify the parent company or where APF is getting its money. The company’s Washington, D.C. address is a virtual office. Its Santa Ana, California office appears to be in an office complex with a Spanish-speaking church, a dental lab, and insurance agency.

Our main office is located in Washington D.C. and we service all 50 States and most Countries. Our experienced staff consists of highly experienced former law enforcement officers. – APF Website

Based on the above information, it seems that the websites are designed to create a much larger presence for American Police Force than actually exists. If there is actually adequate funding and professional personnel available to handle the construction and operation of a detention facility in Montana, the evidence for it isn’t readily available. If this is a scam, the government officials duped into supporting it should be thrown out of office. If the company is legit, there ought to be an investigation as to why it is patrolling the streets in vehicles with “police” decals when the employees are not municipal police. And if this is somehow a botched federal government operation to relocate Guantanamo Bay detainees, there should be Congressional hearings looking into what has occurred.

About the Author

With an advanced international law degree from Georgetown University and more than 15 years of real world legal experience, Attorney Mike Young shows entrepreneurs how to protect and grow their businesses online. He's the author of Internet Marketing Legal Secrets Revealed. Not just a lawyer who focuses exclusively on Internet and marketing law, Mikeâ€™s been working with computers for more than 27 years (his first computer was an Atari 400 with 8 KiB RAM) and started representing Internet businesses back in 1996.

Anti_Illuminati

See this video in relation to this about the "SYSADMIN Force", a term coined by Naval War College NWO mouthpiece who praises the 9/11 false flag, Thomas Barnett. ________________________________________________________Excerpt:

"Unlike the Italian Carabinieri or the Spanish Guardia Civil, the United States lacks a national police that has a paramilitary component, making it difficult to identify an obvious bureaucratic candidate for such an important training mission."

Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

February 14, 2008 —Chairman Tierney, Ranking Member Shays, distinguished members of the Subcommittee, and Subcommittee staff, I am grateful for this opportunity to speak before you today.

It is a truism widely repeated that the United States must think differently to confront the challenge of terrorism in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Yet, despite spending billions of dollars and the passage of over six years, much remains to be done before the United States is ready to meet its new adversary.

My testimony focuses on ways to improve the following aspects of U.S. counterterrorism: 1. use of force; 2. collection and employment of intelligence; 3. homeland security strategy; 4. information campaigns; and 5. diplomatic alliances. I conclude with a call for a more informed public debate—such as this hearing—to review the most controversial counterterrorism measures and develop a broad consensus on the appropriate measures.[1]

I. The Use of Force

U.S. uses of force can be divided into four types: limited retaliatory strikes; targeted killings of terrorist leaders; counterinsurgency; and regime change capabilities as a deterrent. Limited strikes usually fail or backfire, but the other three types of force are necessary for a robust counterterrorism capability.

Limited uses of force against state sponsors or terrorist groups themselves are mostly counterproductive. Most governments and terrorist groups view capitulation in the aftermath of a military attack as an unconscionable admission of weakness, particularly when the strike affects only a few people. For the Taliban to have surrendered bin Laden after the 1998 U.S. strikes on Afghanistan, for example, would have demonstrated to a highly nationalistic people that the regime caved in the face of outside pressure.

Difficulties multiply when force is used directly against terrorists. Terrorist groups themselves have few assets worth destroying. Training camps are rudimentary, and the weapons systems involved are small and easy to replace. There is a strong likelihood of significant civilian casualties, especially if air strikes are employed. Some terrorists deliberately put their facilities near hospitals and schools, targets that are off-limit for civilized nations. Even worse, the terrorists often retaliate. The 1986 air strike on Libya led Muammar el-Qaddafi’s regime to conduct the Pan Am 103 bombing as well as a spate of smaller attacks. Perhaps most important, military strikes can make a terrorist group stronger. The 1998 U.S. strikes against al-Qa’ida camps in Afghanistan made Osama Bin Ladin a hero.

The targeted killing of terrorist leaders is at times necessary for the United States. Targeted killings, however, must be used carefully. They are a poor second to arrests, which are often an option for America; the United States has arrested many more top-tier al-Qa’ida leaders than it has killed. Moreover, the intelligence and military requirements of a sustained targeted killing, or even mass arrest campaign are often daunting, as the United States must operate globally. Even more important, the United States fights salafi jihadists in large part by working with squeamish European countries and wobbly Muslim ones, both of which disapprove of extrajudicial killing for ethical or political reasons, particularly if the attack is highly visible.

A third category for using force receives relatively little attention outside the immediate contexts of Iraq and Afghanistan but is a crucial task for U.S. military forces: fighting al-Qa’ida-linked insurgencies. Al-Qa’ida has many ties to local Islamist insurgencies, and countering the salafi jihadist cause in general at times require fighting them. Insurgencies enhance al-Qa’ida, extending its operations far beyond its own narrow location. Because al-Qa’ida can tap into these insurgencies for recruits, it can replenish its members as they are killed.[2] Insurgencies add legitimacy to al-Qa’ida. Muslims around the world endorse these local struggles—independence for Chechnya, opposition to Serb oppression in the Balkans, and so on—even though they might otherwise oppose al-Qa’ida’s ideological agenda and use of terrorism.

Although the United States has a central role to play in these battles in rare cases such as Afghanistan (and, should things worsen dramatically, tribal parts of Pakistan), whenever possible counterinsurgency is best done by local forces. The United States can play a critical role in integrating intelligence, improving communications, and most important, honing the tactical skills of local forces. Still, the United States cannot expect to enter these countries as local saviors. Even with the best of intentions, foreigners can generate a nationalistic backlash among local citizens who otherwise feel little sympathy for the insurgents.[3] Significant numbers of U.S. troops destroy the legitimacy of local governments and allow the insurgents to claim that they are fighting for the people against outsiders: a damning criticism.

The most important military units for this task will be special operations forces (SOF), which currently number around 50,000. SOF will train foreign troops to fight insurgents, liaise with local populations, help gather intelligence, and otherwise serve as the foundation for the military’s broader efforts against terrorism and insurgency. But counterinsurgency training involves more than just the allied army: it should include police, intelligence services, and paramilitary forces. This concept of “Foreign Internal Defense” can be resurrected and used once more against insurgencies. Building a strong police force is particularly important – usually much more important than aiding a military. Police typically are far better suited to defeating small groups, as they often know the communities well and are trained to use force discriminately.

Unlike the Italian Carabinieri or the Spanish Guardia Civil, the United States lacks a national police that has a paramilitary component, making it difficult to identify an obvious bureaucratic candidate for such an important training mission. The State Department is too small for a massive training mission, and programs in the Department of Justice are limietd. Thus the mission falls upon the Department of Defense, which historically has resisted the foreign internal defense mission.[4] One bureaucracy should be tasked to take the lead on this mission, and Congressional pressure should be focused on ensuring it remains a priority.

Finally, the United States must preserve the capacity to topple regimes that provide substantial support for foreign terrorists. Part of the reason that there are no current governments providing support for terrorists like the Taliban’s Afghanistan did is because governments fear a massive U.S. military response if they provide unconditional support for terrorism. Maintaining this fear is necessary to limit state support for terrorism.

II. Improving Intelligence

Countries dedicated to preventing terrorist attacks around the globe must view the preservation and enhancement of intelligence as a top priority. Although U.S. intelligence is regularly criticized for its “failures,” I believe that a key component of intelligence success—liaison with foreign services—has gone well since 9/11, and that the global intelligence effort against al-Qa’ida and its affiliates is strong. The bigger problem is limited domestic intelligence capabilities.

Although the United States should strive to improve its unilateral intelligence capabilities, for counterterrorism purposes these must at times take a back seat to liaison concerns. Foreign liaison is the single greatest element of successful counterterrorism. Only local governments have the numbers, legal authorities, and means of influence to comprehensively gather intelligence on the global salafi jihadist movement. If America attempts an independent operation abroad, be it a controversial attempt to recruit a foreign government official in Indonesia or a targeted killing operation in Pakistan, it must weigh any possible gains against the potential loss of government intelligence cooperation.

Nor can intelligence gathering be divorced from the issue of winning popular support, requiring attention to the information campaigns as discussed below. If allied governments are not popular (or not sufficiently feared), they will not be able to gather the necessary intelligence from their populace. Local residents may see terrorists as heroes—more Robin Hood than criminals to be arrested. In Pakistan’s tribal areas, bin Ladin remains far more popular than the United States, with local leaders clearly reluctant to provide information on his whereabouts.

U.S. intelligence capabilities are far weaker with regard to terrorism at home than they are concerning terrorism abroad. After over six years, the FBI still is far from being fully effective on counterterrorism. Ensuring a functioning domestic intelligence system must be a national priority. If we fail to gather accurate intelligence, we will not allocate resources properly, and the result will be both a tremendous waste of resources and glaring gaps in intelligence. Most important, we will miss opportunities to disrupt plots before they reach fruition.

At the very least, the United States should explore options for separating the FBI’s intelligence function from its other operations, either by creating a separate agency that focuses exclusively on domestic intelligence or by placing the domestic intelligence function within the Department of Homeland Security. Creating a separate agency makes the most sense on paper, but American suspicions of the very idea of “domestic intelligence,” even if the new agency’s powers were the same as those already given to the FBI, might make this a political non-starter. But DHS already has a mandate to reach out to the private sector and other areas outside the government. Moreover, because DHS is not a law enforcement agency, it does not threaten American citizens and appears less menacing to key communities in the United States.

III. Bolstering Homeland Security

The current terrorist threat to the United States is real but not existential. However, too many analyses emphasize the worst possible case, and too few consider the very real limits of our adversaries and their objectives. It is tempting to say that too much preparation never hurts and that a steady drumbeat of fear is necessary to prepare for what is, in the end, a dangerous movement. But excess preparation is costly. At the very least, it can waste tens or hundreds of billions of dollars that could be better spent on fighting terrorists abroad, or for that matter, on domestic programs or a tax cut. Many terrorist preparation measures carry a considerable human and civil liberties cost. Strict immigration barriers prevent foreigners from studying and visiting our country, which in turn increases hostility to the U.S. government, perhaps even enhancing the potential for anti-U.S. terrorism.

Much state and local spending is done without a formal risk analysis that looks not only at the consequences of a successful attack, but also at the likelihood of the attack occurring in the first place.[5] Enterprising bureaucrats and legislators also use the counterterrorism label to justify their pet programs, ranging from anti-poverty (so terrorists don’t take advantage of despair and anger) to gun control and even to prescription drug benefits (citing the “terror” you would feel if you did not have access to your medication). The opportunity costs of these new foci are considerable. After 9/11, the FBI decreased spending on drug trafficking by 60 percent. Today the FBI and federal authorities focus less on gangs and on domestic terrorist groups (such as white supremacists), even though drugs and gangs have not become any less serious a problem.[6]

The United States should try to think like the terrorists and allocate its defenses accordingly: what targets would resonate with the overseas audiences the salafi jihadists seek to impress. National leadership is an obvious target (and one that is already well defended). Military bases are also targets as attacks on U.S. military forces are a feather in al-Qa’ida’s cap because they avoid the opprobrium that comes with attacks on civilians. Other targets, such as nuclear and chemical plants and dams, warrant a prominent place on the defense list because of the possibility of mass casualties. Even if they are lower on the salafi jihadists’ target list, they deserve extra scrutiny. Defenses should be concentrated on cities that have an international profile--Washington, D.C., New York, and Los Angeles.

An important question to ask is “what are we not defending?” If the answer is that we want to defend all plausible targets, we will fail. Our effort will be overstretched, poorly coordinated, and inordinately expensive. In most low-priority cases, the standard defenses already in place for crime and accidents would suffice. If we overextend our defense networks to include all low-tech targets, we will reach the point where defenses will simply break down—a problem that many proponents of endless spending on homeland defense seem to miss.

Whether we try to defend all targets or not, some attacks will occur. If the passengers aboard American Airlines Flight 63 had been a little less alert (or Richard Reid, the “shoebomber,” had been a little less stupid), there would have been many dead Americans. At some point, the attackers will be either exceptionally skilled, as they were on 9/11, or simply lucky, and Americans will die. Defenses can reduce the overall risk of terrorism, but they cannot eliminate it.

Perception Management and Societal Resilience

An important but often ignored part of homeland security is perception management. As scholar John Mueller contends: “The costs of terrorism commonly come much more from hasty, ill-considered, and over wrought reactions (or overreactions) to it than from anything terrorists have done.”[7] After 9/11, Americans flew less and took fewer vacations, which led to massive job losses in the aviation and tourism industries. As Mueller further notes, the anthrax attacks that killed five people in 2001 have cost the U.S. Postal Service $5 billion: a billion dollars per death.

In the United States the biggest risks are psychological, political, and economic. But because of the high level of fear that already exists, politicians sometimes overreact to terrorism, and, even fan the flames of fear. Instead, government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security should counter these fears by reinforcing the true odds of dying from a terrorist attack. To avoid frightening people, public alerts should be used sparingly. Since 9/11, alerts have been issued in response to intelligence chatter such as threats suggesting attacks on transatlantic flights or during major sporting and political events. Each alert creates panic, and yet at the same each desensitizes the public to the real threat.

A particularly important perception that should be countered is the threat from chemical, radiological, and non-infectious biological weapons such as anthrax. Typically these weapons kill far fewer people than explosives. Yet as the anthrax attacks in 2001 demonstrated, they can instill fear throughout the country. A constant message that reinforces the limited damage of these weapons would offset their psychological power. As they fight misperceptions about the risk of terrorism, U.S. leaders should also focus on building societal resilience.

American Muslims: Our Biggest Ally

Currently, the United States enjoys an overwhelming advantage in the war on terrorism: a supportive American Muslim community. The European experience demonstrates the problems that can arise if resident Muslims are discontent. Unlike in Europe, the Muslim community in the United States is not a fertile ground for radicalism. The 9/11 attacks were carried out by infiltrators from abroad, not home-grown terrorists. Many American Muslims are educated professionals who are well integrated into American society. Often, they have higher average incomes than do non-Muslims. Polls taken shortly after 9/11 indicated that the vast majority see U.S. efforts after 9/11 as directed against terrorism, not Islam.[8] The various plots uncovered since 9/11 have all involved small, disconnected groups and individuals rather than a larger, country-wide network. Several appear to have been discovered with information volunteered from the local Muslim community.

But American Muslim suspicions of the government are growing. Because of measures taken to interview Arab-Americans and to fingerprint and photograph immigrant men, many in this community believes they are being unfairly harassed. Efforts to monitor nongovernmental organizations that may have links to terrorist groups have drawn criticism for interfering with Muslims’ religious obligation to contribute to charity.

These perceptions have made it difficult for police to increase trust between the community and local authorities. As one police officer lamented: “Suppose I get a call about suspicious activity. I have to respond, even if it’s based on prejudice. If I show up, the Arab American feels he is being profiled and trusts the police less. If I don’t show up, I get an angry call or complain that I am not doing my job. It’s a lose-lose situation.”[9] These suspicions can severely hamper counterterrorism efforts. In the worst case scenario, they could inspire Muslims to turn violent. But more likely and more important, the Muslim American communities might present an obstacle rather than an asset to domestic intelligence. As one police officer noted: “We can’t afford to alienate them. Otherwise, we cut off our sources of information.”[10]

To improve ties to the community, several obvious steps should be taken. These range from promoting cultural awareness among the ranks of the FBI and police to being more available to community leaders who wish to communicate their concerns. Police officers and the FBI should strive to work with community leaders, particularly the leaders of the religious community.

Before new counterterrorism measures are announced, we should consider how these measures will be perceived in the Muslim community. When possible, measures should be designed in consultation with local communities and implemented with their cooperation. Short-term and tactical benefits of tactics such as increased fingerprinting of immigrants must be weighed carefully against the possible negative externalities of these efforts. In the end, a supportive and loyal Muslim American community is far more valuable for counterterrorism than any particular piece of intelligence or law enforcement tool.

IV. Improving Information Operations

Since 9/11, the United States has expanded its public diplomacy to win support for U.S. policies. In an attempt to be reach a young audience, the United States has created an Arabic language rock-and-roll radio station (Radio Sawa) and a satellite news station (al-Hurra). Both try to advance a more balanced picture of the news than local media outlets. In addition, through official trips and appearances on regional media such as the satellite news station Al Jazeera, U.S. officials try to explain controversial U.S. policies to skeptical audiences. The response to the U.S. effort has been tepid at best. Images of the Palestinian intifada, devastation in Iraq, and the testimony of poor treatment of Muslims who have visited America easily overshadow these well-intentioned efforts.[11]

The salafi jihadists are far more aggressive, creative, and visceral in their approach to propaganda than the United States. They post vivid images on the internet, deliver fiery sermons in mosques, and spread their message of destruction through word of mouth. Not surprisingly, study after study finds that the United States is losing the war of ideas to the salafi jihadists.

In contrast to al-Qa’ida, we do not integrate the war of ideas into our actual policy decisions. In the highest echelons of the National Security Council or other top decision making bodies, there is no post dedicated to winning over hearts and minds of our friends and our enemies. The closest position is the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy. But this person has to compete with a wide range of diplomatic concerns within the State Department, to say nothing of the rest of the national security bureaucracy. American policy is thus shaped without consideration of how people around the world are likely to perceive it. Rather than consider worldwide reaction before a policy decision is made, diplomats try afterwards to spin the issue in a way that reflects favorably on the United States. The unfortunate result is that the United States fails to take advantage of opportunities to present itself in a positive light.

An obvious first step is to recognize that U.S. relief efforts in the Muslim world have a strategic as well as a humanitarian purpose. Responding to the Tsunami’s devastation in Indonesia or that of an earthquake in Pakistan wins friends and counters negative perceptions of the United States from doing the right thing. We cannot anticipate any particular disaster, but as natural disasters occur regularly we can plan to quickly seize upon the next one to show that America’s heart is in the right place.

Another way to win over key audiences is to woo non-violent Islamists as well as business leaders and media figures. This goal may seem obvious, but it is exceptionally difficult to implement. We cannot assume that “you’re either with us or against us.” The reality is that if you are not with the United States, you are not necessarily with the salafi jihadists. Some Muslims may dislike the United States because of its policies in Iraq and support for Israel; others might abhor U.S. social policies and support for area despots. AEven so, it does not mean Muslims want salafi jihadists in their midst. Reaching out to these audiences may involve bringing these people to the United States for trips and tours, thus increasing their interaction with U.S. officials. A Heritage Foundation report sensibly recommends increasing scholarships to future elites as a way of shaping the next generation.[12]

The United States should be realistic about the possible outcome of such outreach efforts. Rather than expect these officials to become friendly to the United States, we should assume that, at best, they will be more willing to support their local governments against the salafi jihadists, and less likely to view those who use violence as a necessary evil. If the Islamists and other elites themselves were to meet occasionally with U.S. officials or if they were to visit the United States periodically, local governments’ ties to the United States would no longer be seen as a blanket endorsement of U.S. policies. But, to gain more traction with these audiences, the United States would have to make policy concessions – something it so far has been loathe to do, often for good reasons.

Going Negative

Even more important than reaching out to non-violent Islamists is changing the terms of the debate in the Middle East. Rather than focus on supposed U.S. crimes, the debate should center on the very real brutalities of the salafi jihadists. The United States can highlight the victims of terrorism, particularly those who are Arabs, Muslims, or children. For the moderates and even some extremists, no matter how noble a cause al-Qa’ida claims to represent, these victims are off limits. Governments such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Algeria have conducted successful information programs that have discredited the salafi jihadists with many domestic audiences, which often oppose specifics of the salafi jihadists’ agenda and worry about violence and social chaos.

Washington and its allies should also play up the salafi jihadists’ aversion to traditional Islamic practices. Salafis oppose all forms of syncretism and what they see as idol worship. Salafi jihadists take this aversion one step further and often declare more spiritual tendencies within Islam, such as Sufi movements, to be heretics. They may also desecrate graves and shrines, believing them to be idol worship. In Pakistan, salafist groups have often alienated other Muslims by their extreme stands. Because folk customs are widely practiced in the Islamic world, highlighting this hostility will decrease support for the radicals.

Initially these measures will have only a limited effect on the salafi jihadists. Over time, however, recruits and funds will diminish, and communities will be more likely to lend a hand to the police than provide a hiding place for terrorists.

Bureaucratic Changes

To better wage the war of ideas, the United States should undertake a series of bureaucratic changes. One shift is to elevate voices for public diplomacy in parts of the government beyond the State Department. Rather than force diplomats to work with policy after it has been formulated, the policy’s effects on the Muslim street should be considered before is drafted. But while public diplomacy must be integrated at the national level, much of the actual ideas and implementation should be done at the local level. Embassy officials in particular are well-positioned to determine what messages will and will not work in their country: what plays in Morocco may not play in Indonesia.

V. Diplomacy

International cooperation is vital to the war on terrorism. Whether we bomb Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan, work with Thailand to capture local al-Qa’ida members, or press the United Arab Emirates to halt its citizens’ financial support for salafi jihadists, all efforts require assistance from allied governments.

For the purpose of effective counterterrorism, the United States must restructure its foreign policy to make new alliances possible and strengthen old ones. The most important thing the United States can do is identify and court new partners. For the purposes of the war on terrorism, our list of key allies should shift. Britain, Canada, Egypt, France, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey remain high on the list of essential allies, just as they were during the Cold War and immediate post-Cold War eras. Now that the U.S. focus is on al-Qa’ida and the broader salafi jihadist movement, China, Japan, and South Korea are lower on the list, though they remain vital for non-terrorism issues. Several new countries have emerged. Before 9/11, Afghanistan, Jordan, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen were not considered allies (and Afghanistan, of course, was an enemy). Now they join the list of countries essential to fighting terrorism. The most important new partners are India, Indonesia, Iraq, and Pakistan, all of which are at the center of the struggle against terrorism.

In only a few of these countries does the United States have embassies large enough to reach out to all important government agencies, develop contacts among local elites, and woo the broader population. Both the money and personnel devoted to these countries should be increased. In addition, the United States must improve its reach outside the capital, working with local officials and elites and developing a better intelligence base in remote parts of the country.

Given the vital role allies play, improved intelligence sharing is essential for success against terrorists. But because intelligence is easily compromised, agencies generally oppose sharing sensitive information with multiple partners. Unfortunately, information sharing with allies reflects a Cold War counterintelligence environment in which a highly skilled adversary sought to exploit any weakness. Not surprisingly, the United States has moved fitfully on intelligence sharing even though Washington has greatly expanded the number of partnerships and the volume of information exchanged. Al-Qa’ida too is skilled, but its counterintelligence capabilities are a shadow of the Soviet Union’s. Perhaps more important, al-Qa’ida is likely to exploit information gained from public sources—newspaper articles and court records. Information sharing procedures should be loosened to reflect this different counterintelligence environment—in contrast to the past, guarding against a spy among our ranks is less important than ensuring that critical information does not leak from careless or politicized officials.

To ensure the quality of the intelligence that the allies provide, counterintelligence against allied security services is vital. Washington must be sure that allies are on board and that the information being passed to Washington is complete and accurate. It is vital for the United States to know if allied services are withholding information or, even worse, if they have been penetrated by al-Qa’ida.

A Better Debate

Many of the most sensitive issues for counterterrorism today—renditions, expanded wiretapping authority, new judicial procedures, targeted killings, and so on— lie in the gray area between the rule of law and the nation’s security. The merit of these measures depends not only on an objective determination of the threat, but also on how much Americans are willing to sacrifice: a political rather than policy question. An honest debate would serve our country well, and thus I particularly welcome hearings like these, even though the subject matter is grim.

To succeed in the long-term, counterterrorism policies must be politically viable for decades. I do not know who will win the presidential election in 2008, let alone in the years to come, but I do know that in the next 25 years the United States is likely to have both conservative and liberal leaders. Policies that sway with the political winds of the day will suffer from inevitable beginners’ mistakes and transition costs. Moreover, those who implement them will be hesitant as they will correctly fear that they may be hung out to dry should political circumstances shift. As a result, policy should rest on a large degree of consensus and on well-informed and unbiased debate, even though this will be difficult to forge in today’s political environment.

[1] This testimony draws heavily on my recently released book, The Five Front War: The Better Way to Fight Global Jihad (Wiley, 2008).

[2] The ability to recruit and replace lost cadre is vital for successful terrorist organizations. Kim Cragin and Sara A. Daly, The Dynamic Terrorist Threat: An Assessment of Group Motivations and Capabilities in a Changing World (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2003), 34-36.

[6] Nicole J. Henderson, Christopher W. Ortiz, Naomi F. Sugie, and Joel Miller, Law Enforcement & Arab American Community Relations After September 11, 2001: Engagement in a Time of Uncertainty (New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2006), 17 and 18. Available at http://www.vera.org/policerelations.

nofakenews

defenseproductsolutions.com is hosted on the same IP (97.74.186.121) as americanpolicegroup.com. Both sites feature the same logo. Click on the Catalog link on defenseproductsolutions.com and say ‘hello’ to Edward Angelino.

Other business names associated with him: Allied Defense Systems, Inc. (allieddefensesystems.com) and Defense Consulting Group, Inc. There are almost certainly many more. I only spent ten minutes on this.

I looked through a couple of the sites that use the same template and noticed this:

allieddefensesystems.com/aboutus.htm:

Founded in 1990, ADS and its veteran team have serviced a variety of contracts under extreme conditions in the Middle East. Our projects have ranged from base camp construction operations to supplying world-class military vehicles. In the midst of international tensions, ADS will perform.

defenseproductsolutions.com/aboutus.htm:

Founded in 2004, DPS and its veteran team have serviced a variety of contracts under extreme conditions in the Middle East. Our projects have ranged from base camp construction operations to supplying world-class military vehicles. In the midst of international tensions, DPS will perform.

There are many addresses, phone and fax numbers associated with all of this. I’m not sure why the Associated Press and others haven’t made these connections, but it’s all available on Google.

Via: AP:

The Two Rivers Detention Center was promoted as the largest economic development project in decades in the small town of Hardin when the jail was built two years ago. But it has been vacant ever since.

City officials have searched from Vermont to Alaska for inmate contracts to fill the jail, only to be turned down at every turn and see the bonds that financed its construction fall into default. They even floated the idea of housing prisoners from Guantanamo Bay at the jail.

So when Hardin officials announced this week that they had signed a deal with a California company to fill the empty jail, it was naturally a cause for celebration. Town officials talked about throwing a party to mark the occasion, their dreams of economic salvation a step closer to being realized.

But questions are emerging over the legitimacy of the company, American Police Force.

Government contract databases show no record of the company. Security industry representatives and federal officials said they had never heard of it. On its Web site, the company lists as its headquarters a building in Washington near the White House that holds “virtual offices.” A spokeswoman for the building said American Police Force never completed its application to use the address.

And it’s unclear where the company will get the inmates for the jail. Montana says it’s not sending inmates to the jail, and neither are federal officials in the state.

An attorney for American Police Force, Maziar Mafi, describes the Santa Ana, Calif., company as a fledgling spin-off of a major security firm founded in 1984. But Mafi declined to name the parent firm or provide details on how the company will finance its jail operations.

“It will gradually be more clear as things go along,” said Mafi, a personal injury and medical malpractice lawyer in Santa Ana who was only hired by American Police Force a month ago. “The nature of this entity is private security and for security purposes, as well as for the interest of their clientele, that’s why they prefer not to be upfront.”

On its elaborate Web site and in interviews with company representatives, American Police Force claims to sell assault rifles and other weapons in Afghanistan on behalf of the U.S. military while providing security, investigative work and other services to clients “in all 50 states and most countries.”

The company also boasts to have “rapid response units awaiting our orders worldwide” and that it can field a battalion-sized team of special forces soldiers “within 72 hours.”

Representatives of American Police Force said the company presently employs at least 16 and as many as 28 people in the United States and 1,600 contractors worldwide.

“APF plays a critical role in helping the U.S. government meet vital homeland security and national defense needs,” the company says on its Web site. “Within the last 5 years the United States has been far and away our” number 1 client.

However, an Associated Press search of two comprehensive federal government contractor databases turned up no record of American Police Force.

Representatives of security trade groups said they had never heard of American Police Force, although they added secrecy was prevalent in the industry and it was possible the company had avoided the public limelight.

“They’re really invisible,” said Alan Chvotkin, executive vice president and counsel for the Professional Services Council. The group’s members include major security contractors Triple Canopy, DynCorp and Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide.

“Even a single unclassified contract in the last couple of years should show up” in the federal database, Chvotkin added.

Spokesmen for the State Department and Defense Department said they could not immediately find any records of contracts with the company. The city has not released a copy of its agreement with American Police Force. But the deal as announced would be a sweet one for Hardin, a depressed rural town of 3,500 about 45 miles east of Billings.

The company is pledging to fill the 464-bed facility by early next year.

Hardin officials say the first payment on the contract is due Feb. 1 — regardless of whether any prisoners are in place. The city’s economic development authority would get enough money to pay off the bondholders and receive $5 per prison a day.

American Police Force also is promising to invest $30 million in new projects for the city, including a military and law enforcement training center with a 250-bed dormitory and an expansion of the jail to 2,000 beds. The company says it will build a homeless shelter, offer free health care for city residents and even deliver meals to the needy.

Where the prisoners would come from is unclear. City officials said California was the most likely possibility, but a spokesman for that state’s corrections system said there was no truth to the claim.

Federal prisoners also were mentioned by both American Police Force and the city. U.S. Marshal Dwight MacKay in Billings said he would have been notified if such a plan was pending.

“There’s skepticism over whether this is a real thing,” MacKay said.

Hardin officials said they were approached by American Police Force about six months ago, soon after the city made international news in its quest to become “America’s Gitmo.” American Police Force incorporated around the same time.

Albert Peterson, the city’s school superintendent and vice president of the authority that built the jail, said the city was “guaranteed” the contract would be upheld.

“There’s never a question in my mind after I’ve done my homework. It’s legit,” Peterson said of American Police Force. “We believe in each other.”

The contract was still being reviewed by the city attorney, he said.

Peterson refused to answer when asked if he knew the name of American Police Force’s parent firm. He said news coverage of the city’s political tussles with the administration of Gov. Brian Schweitzer had left him suspicious of the press. The administration brought a court challenge over whether Hardin could take out-of-state inmates at the jail.

“If you’re looking for the source of the money, you’re not going to find it from me,” Peterson said.

A member of the Texas consortium that developed the jail, Mike Harling, said he had “every reason to believe they’ll be successful.”

Mafi, the American Police Force attorney, said his company intends to reverse Hardin’s recent problems with the jail and give the town an economic boost.

In Santa Ana, American Police Force occupies a single suite on the second floor of a two-story office building. During a visit to the location Thursday, a reporter for The Associated Press encountered a uniformed man behind a desk who would identify himself only as “Captain Michael.”

The man declined to discuss basic details about the company and referred the reporter to the company’s Web site. In a subsequent phone interview, he provided his surname but insisted it not be used because of security concerns. The man said he was a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Montenegro with decades of experience in military and law enforcement operations.

The man said his boss is a retired U.S. Army colonel named Richard Culver who is currently overseas. Culver’s role with the company could not be immediately verified.

The company claim of a headquarters address is just up the street from the White House.

The K Street building houses “virtual offices,” where clients pay to use the prestigious Pennsylvania Avenue address and gain access to onsite conference rooms but have no permanent presence.

“It lets small businesses get started up and have a professional front and not have a lot of a cash to do it,” said Ashley Korner with Preferred Offices, which leases the location.

She said American Police Force’s application to use the address was pending, but incomplete.

Personally... I dont think that website is very professional looking.. It looks like something a 17 yo could do. It looks like a spoof site to me. This cant be real can it? I mean they go after cheating spouses too??

Global Network APF draws upon their vast global network of highly ranked officers and government officials providing private investigative services unparalelled to any operation in the industry worldwide. Our vast network of senior government officials both domestic and international combined with our law enforcement colleagues and current workforce has earned APF a reputation as an industry leader.

Global Network APF draws upon their vast global network of highly ranked officers and government officials providing private investigative services unparalelled to any operation in the industry worldwide. Our vast network of senior government officials both domestic and international combined with our law enforcement colleagues and current workforce has earned APF a reputation as an industry leader.

Can you say an international global police force on American soil??

Well if I were president I'd put a stop to it. Vote Freeski in 2010!

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"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it." Martin Luther King, Jr.

Russia (Serbia), America and France (Quebec)... where's jolly old England in the logo?

The crown.

Logged

"Logic is an enemy and truth is a menace." ~ Rod Serling"Cops today are nothing but an armed tax collector" ~ Frank Serpico"To be normal, to drink Coca-Cola and eat Kentucky Fried Chicken is to be in a conspiracy against yourself.""People that don't want to make waves sit in stagnant waters."

Personally... I dont think that website is very professional looking.. It looks like something a 17 yo could do. It looks like a spoof site to me. This cant be real can it? I mean they go after cheating spouses too??

Thank you I concur. If you listen to the news broadcasts it's obvious the people who run Hardin are complete idiots (no experience, but they award this group the contract???!!!). If the APF are the new enforcers it's going to be alot like "idiocracy", hell it already is. Are they just not even trying anymore? I mean how blatantly foreign could that APF's accent be, or the stupid crest on their site?

BILLINGS - American Police Force officials showed up in Mercedes SUV's that had "Hardin Police" stenciled on the vehicles. The twist, the city of Hardin doesn't have a police department. Two Rivers Authority officials say having APF patrol the streets was never part of their agenda. "I have no idea. I really don't because that's not been a part of any of the discussions we've had with any of them," said Two Rivers Authority's Al Peterson.

As it stands now the Big Horn County Sheriff's Department is contracted to patrol the city and APF has no jurisdiction. If that was changed Peterson says it would have to go through the city council.

As for the jail contract with APF, both sides are yet to agree to a deal as bondholders rejected it again on Thursday morning. "It's a complicated issue there are a lot of tax laws to work through we were hoping to get it by Tuesday night now we're hoping to get it by Friday night," said Peterson.

Officials say the contract only deals with the detention facility and a police training center. There's no mention of a homeless shelter, animal shelter, or any services for the area.

"That was never in the contract to begin with. I think it was on a wish list of what Captain Michael wanted to do here," said Peterson. American Police Force officials plan to stay in the area for the next month.

I went to the address that everyone is posting on the internet - it is the wrong address. South Coast Patient Center is still at suite 200 and very very nice people there so don't anybody go harrassing them. APF is actually in the suite next door (must have been a typo on the APF website or maybe it was intentional - regardless....).

Between the time I left my house and the time the lady at suite 200 looked up APF website to see what I was talking about, the address had been removed from APF's website - because people are making death threats to APF and they had to leave the office today because of it. People, making death threats is not going to really address this situation so please do not anyone even go down that road. That won't solve it - you know that! It only drives the issue underground - need to handle this situation the right way and death threats is not it.

HOWEVER - this situation is very real - the company definitely exists and there is definitely a contract with Montana.

I even saw the guy in the pictures - he came in and borrowed a lighter from the lady I was talking to and he definitely has an accent. Guess you could say I was shocked to see what I thought was a cop come into a medical maryjane outlet while I was in there investigating what I really hoped was an internet hoax...... I'm a bit angry at myself for freaking out thinking I was about to be arrested for being there - just wish I had been a little bit faster on my toes so I could have asked him two questions.

1) Is Obama really privatizing police forces?2) What are the other 29 cities?